Cultivate the Unconscious Solution
As a creative person, you've likely had the experience of struggling with a thorny, immovable problem or puzzle: how to organize a painting, a piece of music, a piece of writing. How to kill off a character in your screenplay. What metaphor to use in your story. Which path to take on your next project. What your next project should even be.
And you’ve also likely experienced the futility of trying to force a solution. Of going to sleep hopeless and distraught, with a sense of despair.
Only to find that when you wake, the perfect answer to your question has been miraculously presented to you by your unconscious mind.
In 1934, writer Dorothea Brande described the experience of “having reached a decision, solved a problem, while we slept, and finding the decision good, the solution valid.”
Let’s call this the Unconscious Solution.
As it turns out, the seemingly miraculous epiphanies of the Unconscious Solution can be cultivated. In her classic book Becoming a Writer, Brande encouraged aspiring writers to strengthen their link to their unconscious mind as a foundational part of the creative process.
To start, she suggested writing journalistically first thing in the morning. “Rise a half hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before, begin to write.” A practice such as this one, in which you write, unfettered, on any topic that brushes the mind can strengthen a creator’s general link to the unconscious. “Write as long as you have free time,” Brande continues, “or until you feel that you have utterly written yourself out.”
Like Brande and countless other artists, you can experience the same benefit of a morning writing practice.
As you exercise this capacity, the trickle between your conscious and unconscious mind will become a flow, and then a channel. You will find soft, effortless solutions that brute intellectual force could never deliver.
Some artists simply send up a prayer of thanks for the miracle epiphany. Others make the Unconscious Solution part of their creative toolbox. Make it part of yours.
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